


Flowers and Ash

by linaerys



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:52:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linaerys/pseuds/linaerys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How to keep surviving.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flowers and Ash

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alchemine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alchemine/gifts).



After the first five years, the dying off slows down a little bit, and Rick has a few minutes to relax. Used to be, every time a new group wandered into their camp, he could count on half of them dying: bites, despair, stupidity.

He limits the number of people he cares about to the bare minimum. Family. Shane. Shane’s kids when they come along, although Shane’s woman seems fragile, and proves it by hanging herself after giving birth to her third child, the second one living.

The permanent camp is a former army compound with underground bunkers. It took months just to clear out the dead bodies. Months while they slept in tents and were vulnerable to attack. Months when it seemed to Rick they were losing this war of attrition. He thought often of Dr. Jenner and Jaqui then, their fireball, their death.

But he thought more of the enviable security of the CDC, the doors that wouldn’t open. Once the bodies were clear, burned, and buried, they moved in. Lori developed a pallor from never going outside. She said she hated the smell out there. She kept Carl suffocatingly close until Rick put his foot down. Boy was gonna keep fighting, just like the rest of them.

Rick dreams, vivid and deeply. They all do. But the ones who survive are the ones who don’t talk about it.

Walkers haunt Rick’s dreams. In dreams they talk to him. Some rail against their fate, others seem pleased enough with it. They tell him about the lure of living flesh, the spurt of warm blood into a dead mouth.

He dreams too often of the legless one, the crawler. The first one he killed. He thought then, that he accepted it, this terrible new world. But it’s a long process, a hard choice every day, to live in the new world, or die from it.

That first day, he woke up and it seemed a dream. It still does from time to time, a nightmare with no waking.

In some ways, he thinks he’s lucky to have slept through the terrible early days, the month when the world went mad. The scars he carries are lighter than those who had to fight off their own government as well as the Dead.

When he woke, it was to an empty earth. The sky seemed bigger without planes streaking across it. He was alone with a gun and a horse. He was John Wayne. He was Steve McQueen from _The Magnificent Seven_ , only it was just him, his gun, his horse, against the world.

Those types still wander into the camp from time to time. The lone survivors, their humanity whittled down to a tiny little nub. LMEs, Glenn calls them. Last Men on Earth. They spent too long, alone: just a gun and a mission.

Some are glad to see living people, but too many can’t handle it. They ride off on their choppers or horses, trying to find that perfect loneliness again. Man against monster, none of the burdens of civilization.

The camp has two rings of defenses, walls bought with sweat and tears and yes, more death. Every day, patrols sweep the inner walls and kill the Walkers who’ve gotten in. Once a week they kill off the ones who ring the outside perimeter. They load the corpses into the back of Daryl’s truck, and burn them on a heap of greasy, black ash that is only getting taller.

It becomes easier when Rick starts to see himself as sheriff again. They hold elections once the walls are built. Glenn for President—even Daryl votes for him—and Rick for Sheriff. But even before that Rick starts to remember the lessons he learned on the beat: the world is full of dumb shits and sad cases, and you can’t get attached. The one will kill the other, and both types will try to bring you down with them.

It took five years, too, for Rick to sleep well more than one night in a row. On the long march to find this place, he felt like one of Them, only his lizard brain keeping him going, leaving a trail of graves dug, and humanity stripped away.

The worst dreams are the ones they all have, the ones they don’t talk about. The ones where life is back to normal. The ones where he’s fighting a gunman, and the only thing he’s worried about is getting shot, not the Walkers the shots will draw. The ones where he’s watching a game, and drinking a beer, eating guacamole that doesn’t come from a powder.

He wakes from those to heavy gray days, days that stretch endlessly on into the future, with no rewards. Too many of those dreams and he starts to think that this is the dream, the nightmare from which he can’t wake.

Today Carl is getting married. He’s only seventeen, but he’s as much a man as Rick will ever be. He’s been killing Walkers since he was ten, and helping his daddy and Shane keep order since he was fourteen. He never grew as tall as Rick—bad food and fear will stunt a boy—but he’s wiry-strong. The girl is young too, wild and fierce as Carl. These two will raise the generation who will take the world back, Rick hopes. God knows his failed.

A former priest performs the ceremony. Lori talked to him about how to make it Baptist enough for their sensibilities. Not that anyone cares much about that anymore. After the Event, the priest, Father Jerry, as everyone still calls him, found a wife, and got her pregnant with a succession of babies. Some are old enough to carry guns themselves now.

“God told us to be fruitful and multiply,” he told Rick. “Now seems like the time to do it.”

Sometimes the camp echoes with the sounds of children laughing and crying. It’s the only time that Rick feels whole.

Lori left the safety of the underground compound to go with Carl’s girl, Minnie, and try to find a dress in the mall, dark and silent and fifty miles away. She and Rick and Carl took their guns and some wicker baskets to the nearby suburbs to collect flowers from overgrown gardens. The camp’s garden contains strictly fruits and vegetables: succulent tomatoes in the summer and big hard squashes to get them through the winter.

Minnie is already pregnant, but that’s not why they’re getting married. This world produces tight bonds, and Carl and Minnie are already closer than Rick and Lori ever were before the Event. They’ll be fine.

They stand under the summer sun on the roof of the compound. Father Jerry says the words. Minnie wears the flowers Lori picked in her hair. A simple white dress from another time tents out over her growing belly. She wears flat white athletic sandals on her feet. None of the women in this world wear heels or makeup anymore. Minnie’s face is tan and unadorned.

In three months she may die in childbirth, like no few of the women have. Rick’s seen enough to know that even the strongest of them can die that way.

Carl kisses her and they all cheer. Father Jerry plays a passable guitar, enough that they can dance: Rick with Minnie, Lori with Carl.

Minnie dances like the child she was when the world ended. The child she still is. The song ends, and everyone claps. Over Minnie’s shoulder, the pyramid of corpses still smokes, but the breeze carries the scent away from them, and today laughter drowns out the moans of the Dead.


End file.
